(323) Projects

I opened my own project space recently. I’m very excited about this new endeavor and am lining up some amazing artists for exhibitions this year and in 2011. If you are interested in (323) Projects please email contact@323projects.com.

(323) Projects exists to provide a dispersed, peripatetic, and constantly accessible venue for artists of all kinds who seek to explore issues important to their respective practices. The artists involved with (323) Projects provide, create, or perform works that can be appreciated in bits and pieces, and at more than one time, in both public and private spaces, by an unseen, yet omnipresent, local and international audience.

HOW IT WORKS

Exhibitions at (323) Projects can be reached by dialing (323) 843-4652. Once the caller connects, they hear an audio recording by a featured artist. The only charge for the call is a local connection fee billed to the caller (the same charge one would get for calling a Los Angeles local number). In certain instances the caller will have the option of leaving a message that the exhibiting artist can then hear and do with what they will.

(323) Projects is not a commercial gallery. Each artist exhibiting with (323) Projects retains all rights and ownership of their work. Artists may chose to produce limited editions, promotional material, or CDs to be used as fundraising materials for (323) Projects, but (323) Projects does not represent artists or sell artwork for a profit.

Each artist has complete control over their exhibition and can opt to change their audio as much as they like, or they can have one sound piece last their entire show. Artists can change their voicemail message with an easy-to-use online service that accepts sound files (WAV or MP3) of up to 10MB in size. For more on how this works email contact@323projects.com.

Callers then have the opportunity to leave a message. It is up to the artist what they want to do with these messages. In addition to many technical tracking services, the answering service for this exhibition allows the artist to see the phone numbers of audience members who have called in. Again, it is up to the artist what he or she would like to do with this information.

(323) Projects is supported by grass-roots fundraising efforts, teamwork and collaborations with dedicated artists and art lovers. We hope to seek non-profit status in early 2011. If you would like to support (323) Projects in any way please email contact@323projects.com

HISTORY

Forty years ago the poet and performance artist John Giorno established Dial-A-Poem, a landmark experiment enabling individuals from all over the world to call in to multiple telephone lines and listen to a changing lineup of poems, sounds, and music by some of the leading artists of the day like William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg, as well as a sundry of political speeches, Buddhist chants, and all manner of aural stimulation. Dial-A-Poem lasted until 1971, but its influence was widespread and immediate, as evidenced by the success of its contributors, and the emergence later of a robust telecommunications arts genre. (323) Projects seeks to explore how a contemporary audience, equipped with both landlines and cell phones, will access Giorno’s Dial-A-Poem exhibition format as a project space re-engineered using 21st Century technology.

(323) Projects builds on Giorno’s prescient exhibition format, but with slight alterations. Instead of allotting three minutes to each artist, with work randomly selected by a set of answering machines, (323) Projects allows artists to have complete control of the gallery’s exhibition platform – a phone number connected to a voicemail service- for the duration of their show. Using sound pieces that can run from a second to up to half an hour, artists use this exhibition format to experiment with the formal, durational, and temporal possibilities.